Yale Law School (Yale), US News logo (US News & World Report) Woohoo! The U.S. News & World Report rankings of America’s top law schools now offer a slightly better reflection of reality: Yale Law School lost the top spot, which it held for 35 years, after several scandals tarnished its reputation as a serious institution. Many of those were first reported by the Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium, and he writes that Stanford now holds the top spot while Yale is tied for second with the University of Chicago. Harvard Law School, meanwhile, has fallen to number six. The downgrade comes after Yale withdrew from the rankings in 2022 like a petulant (Yale) child, arguing that the rankings and presumably any other measurement of merit—Yale Law School does not assign grades—“disincentivize programs that support public interest careers,” whatever that means. Yale is still included in the U.S. News rankings even though it no longer turns over data to the publication. It dismissed the rankings, saying the school is “proud to have sparked a movement away from these rankings four years ago” and is “focused on providing a rigorous and excellent legal education and increasing access and opportunity to law school and the profession.” “Whether Yale actually provides such an education became the subject of debate in 2021, when a second-year law student, Trent Colbert, wrote an email inviting classmates to his apartment, which he lightheartedly described as a ‘traphouse,’ a slang term for an inner-city drug den to which many of his classmates took offense,” Sibarium writes. “The email, which sparked nine complaints to the law school’s discrimination and harassment office, led to a weeks-long inquisition in which administrators pressured Colbert to sign an apology they had written on his behalf, citing the ‘trauma’ he had caused his classmates and suggesting that he could face disciplinary action and professional repercussions if he failed to apologize.” The dean of Yale Law School at the time, who passed the buck and blamed her subordinates for the fiasco, is now the president of the left-wing Ford Foundation. She was passed over for the Yale presidency in 2024 when the search committee pulled a Cheney and tapped one of its own members, Maurie McInnis, who was then serving as the president of Stony Brook University and called the cops to demolish an anti-Israel encampment, instead. READ MORE: Yale Law School Loses Top Spot in US News Rankings After Scandals Tarnish Ivy League School